The news of the death of our brother king had come with a great sorrow to us all, to me especially. He had been our ultimate brother for as long as most of us could remember, and the few others who could remember for longer than that knew that the generations before him had been destitute in comparison to the generations of prosperity that he had brought to us.
As the oldest offspring of our brother king, our sister queen had taken his place after his unfortunate death a few seasons ago. She had been thrust into her position with a burden of expectations from the swarm that very few thought she would be able to meet; and, for a notable first, I concurred with the majority opinion. Busy as I was with my research and my studies, I knew nothing about her; and unlike her sire, upon whom I had quickly passed positive judgment in my juvenile years, she had not had from me the benefit of the doubt—a privilege that my adult mind distributed in more niggardly proportions.
But it must have been the grave atmosphere of this meeting, which was privy to so few eyes, or perhaps it was due to her shrills, which sounded so much like those of our departed brother king, that made her countenance fill me with an unprecedented optimism. In any case, I was completely silent and reverent as she initiated discourse:
“Brother,” she shrilled, “I assume you know why I have summoned you.”
“I understand we are united by a common aptitude,” I replied. “However, I am still unclear as to what purpose.”
She nodded. Her eyes went pale as she looked to the sky. I could see that she was contemplating a grievous thought, one of such lofty weight and of severe consequences that it was an effort in itself to find the right way to express it without sending the recipient of the thought into a state of sheer panic. At length, she shrilled: “Brother, are you aware of the problem that our departed brother king spent his last breaths trying to solve?”
“If I only knew,” I answered, honestly.
There was another silence. Even the sounds of the gusts of air being tossed by the wings of my brothers and sisters around me seemed to mute. I felt like a juvenile again, surrounded by adults who had accidentally let slip the hints of a notion that they thought my naive mind would not have been able to bear and who had responded to my inquiries as to its nature with worried stares and dismissive tones. I didn’t like it.
“Brother,” my sister queen shrilled again, “are you hungry?”
This new line of thought confused me greatly. Where did she intend to go with this? Did she invite me out here in the middle of the night merely for a picnic? I made sure to use the appropriate subjunctives of doubt and of confusion when I shrilled, in essence: “Were I hungry, I would most certainly not be here.”
She didn’t seem to appreciate that; and, I must admit, it was an obnoxious response. But how else should I have answered? The question she had posed to me was out of place and irrelevant. It didn’t seem worthy of my time, much less hers. And yet . . .
“I insist that you be sure of your answer,” she responded, with a warranted choice of a damning mood.
I turned my mind inward; and, when I felt it, I almost dropped to the ground in exhaustion: A pit, an empty pit the size of my stomach, slowly consuming the rest of my body. I hadn’t noticed it until now, but when I did, my memories came flooding back to me in an overwhelming torrent:
I started to remember details that I had at the time looked over. Now, as an adult—even before that, when I had been an adolescent—I did not have the energy and the vigor I did in those of my juvenile years. I had become angry, dismissive, and critical of my brothers and sisters. I had been thinking of only myself, not of them, of what I could have done to further my goals in disregard of theirs. That was not how we were raised; that was not how we lived. But I was not the only one. I noticed now that things were very different. The females were laying fewer eggs during mating seasons, which were becoming more and more infrequent; and though none had voiced it, we had all started to look at those seasons as an effort, a chore, one of those mundane routines that had to be endured as a consequence of life. Raids had become marked efforts as well, each one seeming to be less than we had hoped, for some unspoken reason, and we always had higher expectations for the future ones, and the future ones never seemed to satisfy. I had ignored it and had gone about my ways with grunts and pouts, but I had never truly been happy, at least since I had been an adolescent. I couldn’t even remember the last time I saw a smile of pure ecstasy from one of my brothers or sisters. I had become so used to the lethargy that I had accepted as a fact that life was plain and gray. What was wrong with us? I had never asked, but I knew now more than ever.
“Yes,” I shrilled when I realized it, “I’m very hungry.”
“Is that the case!” I heard the male who addressed me earlier shriek, and when the moonlight caught his face, I recognized him as one of my colleagues. It was not his identity nor his caustic tone that had captured my attention; it was the fact that he had said it in the lingua franca. “Are you so detached from us that you didn’t see this? Have you truly forgotten us in your little world of verb conjugations? Well, then, Errenax,”—he spat my phonetic name with disdain and irony—“allow me to put it in terms you will understand: we’re starving!”
I tried to turn my body back toward my sister queen, but it moved sluggishly and painfully. Still, I pushed it. I didn’t want to look into my brother’s eyes—because he was right. The worst part was that he had not carried his censure to its deserved extent. I had been detached. So detached, that I hadn’t even realized my own growling stomach, much less heard the rumbles of the stomachs of my brothers and sisters, nor had I made any attempts to think about possible solutions. I had taken my resources for granted, and I had been so oblivious that I hadn’t even realized that they had been dwindling.
“Take a look around you, brother,” my sister queen said, once she had my attention again. “We cannot stay in these lands forever. There is nothing left for us here. But fear not, for our departed brother king found the land of our salvation, a land that would provide us with everything we need for countless generations to come.”
Across the water to the west, she explained, was a land with mountains, deserts, rolling plains, climbing hills, and the most fertile lands that existed on the globe. It had been plowed and planted with an abundance of food by a species whose productivity was unparalleled by any other’s. Across the land, their multitude of settlements spread, their habitations made out of iron and granite, stretching so far into the sky that their tops could not be seen by those looking upon them from the ground. Their intelligence was on par with ours, but why they did not exercise their natural right of the superiority of their species by taking the produce of those who were inferior, we did not know. But that didn’t matter; if they didn’t see the natural order of things, we did. That made us their betters, and everything they ever made belonged to us by natural right. And she wanted us six to be the first of our swarm to see these beasts and the fruits of their toil.
“But why us?” I asked my sister queen. “We’re not the strongest, nor the most massive of the swarm.”
“You’re the only ones in our family who are fluent or have some skill in the language of their species,” she replied.
I understood. But it was not simply a matter of flying over there and reaping their labor and love. With their intelligence and their survival by produce no doubt came a vigilance that had ensured their survival for many years. Our brother king had been certain that they had had many predators, who had been decisively defeated by them many times before. He had known about them for a long time and had never told any of us, for he had not considered the benefits of the land to surpass in magnitude the danger of such an expedition. But as he had grown weaker and more ill, and as he had seen a similar fate looming over all our heads, he recorded the first notions of the plan of an invasion of a kind we had never performed before, which would require tactics unheard of in the history of our species. The land was too big and their population too great that we would not be able to overwhelm them with our numbers, in accordance with our usual method of operation. No, we would have to, like our close relative the wasp, insert the seeds of our species right into the belly of the unsuspecting creature and rupture its intestines from the inside when the time was right. And the six of us were to be those seeds.
It was ambitious, and the rewards would be like none we’d ever seen before—but it was also the most dangerous task we’d ever set ourselves to. Just thinking about the number of capricious variables that determined our success, upon which the entire future of our swarm lay, made my head spin with fear.
*
The biology of our species is perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of the natural world. This is not due to our capacity of flight, which many creatures have. It is not due to our refined vocal chords, which can make high-frequency clicks and can transmit the sounds of our language to great distances. Nor is it due to our ears, which have the ability to receive these sounds. It is this: our faculty of magic has the inherent ability to make the atoms that compose our bodies assume a different position and function at will, effectively giving us the power to turn into any creature—or any combination of creatures—that we desire for any purpose. It is due to this sole trait that the lingua franca gives us the name changeling.
But there is something that this does not protect us against, no matter how hard we try, something that has no name in the lingua franca, to my knowledge: It is the ability of any creature to be able to detect unnameable incongruities in not only its own body but also those in the sight of his kin. The closest translation from the word in our language representing this sense is feeling—often appended with the genitive gut. It’s what causes any animal to treat with suspicion and caution any other animal, even if it’s one of its own species, should it posses a deformity, an incapacitating virus; or should its behavior differ, even slightly, from the norm. This means that assuming the appearance of our prey is good only for getting closer for the strike, nothing more than a natural camouflage, like that of the leaf-like appearance of the katydid. But camouflage is not the same as invisibility, and an observant creature can usually pick out the imposter, even when the changeling is trying to hide in the cover of a large group.
I was not alone in my apprehensions when our sister queen proposed her intentions for us. Our initial thought was to refuse, dismissing it as impossible—and even suicidal. But she told us of what was at stake: She reminded us of our brothers and sisters emaciating away in malnutrition, and she shrilled with that grandeur and ambition like that of her sire; and, with that, she recalled to us the memory of our departed brother king. Our brother king had always thought of us as an unstoppable force, capable of surpassing all other creatures in might and ability, and the only thing that was preventing us from doing so was our collective will of restraint.
But it was time to take those restraints off, for the sake of the swarm, and practice our prowess at disguise and deception until it reached the point where, when we assumed our enemies’ forms, even our brothers and sisters would not be able to tell us apart.
And practice we did.
*
It was our first meeting after our sister queen had given us our goal, and I had just arrived to see the five of them already there. They tried to greet me with friendly shrills, but I held my hoof up in the same manner as I usually did to demand for silence from my students and said: “We’re meeting every day to prepare us for a mission that depends upon our fluency in a second language. I’m not sure how proficient some of you are, but I do know this: No matter how good you are, there’s always an opportunity to improve, and the only way to improve is to work on it every day. I can’t emphasize this last point enough—every day. Therefore, at these gatherings, you shall not use your mother tongue; communication will take place exclusively within the confines of the lingua franca.”
My colleague, the male who had confronted me during that night with our sister queen, spoke up almost immediately: “What power gave you the right to speak for the group?” he said.
I shook my head. “This has nothing to do with rights or power,” I said. “How have you not made this observation yourself? What about your students? With which ones are you able to speak as you do to me now: the ones who shrill in their private conversations as soon as your lesson is over, or the quiet ones who study every day and listen with rapt attention to your lectures, not satisfied until they understand the meaning and grammatical function of every word that comes out of your mouth? Out of these two categories, in which did I fall? In which did you?”
“Look at you!” he sneered. “You talk to me now as you do in your lectures, with your dogmatism, with your flat assertions, with your unstructured and capriciously-delivered lessons. But you forget, my colleague, that this is not your classroom. I am not your student. I’m your intellectual equal, and I expect to be treated as such. I will shrill if I desire.” Oddly enough, he did not.
I noted, yet again, the ever persistent criticisms of my teaching style. Was he still bitter from the time I eviscerated a theory he was working on a few months back? I thought this, but I dared not to say it. Instead, I said: “Discipline has nothing to do with it,” I went on. “I speculate that it just has something to do with the way the mind works. Too many view language as a mere tool, which they think is something that they can practice intermittently and improve upon, as they would do with any other skill. But a language is not merely a tool; it’s a mindset. You know this. It’s as if you can switch a part of your brain back and forth between two modes; and the only way it got instantiated, so ingrained into your subconsciousness as anything else, was because you tended to it every day. Now, I’m not going to argue with you; and, obviously I can’t make you abandon or disfavor your mother tongue. But should you shrill to me, I will not respond, because, for all intents and purposes, I am our inferiors—and our inferiors can not understand, much less hear, those strange sounds that you make.”
He scoffed and then fluttered down into the grass in a dismissive whirl, as if I were too morally low to talk to him. I didn’t mind; his type of intellectual was all too common, no matter the field of study—argumentative for the sake of argumentation. He just wanted to know he was being heard. But if he had looked, he would’ve seen the four others looking at me with inquiry.
The female I had run into the day prior broke the silence. “Teacher,” she said, her voice high and strangled, “can you . . . help me with . . . verb declensions?”
“Conjugations,” I corrected. “And yes, I will help you.”
*
“What did you do today?” I said, not slowing down my speech from its regular pace for her benefit.
“I had . . . woken up,” she stammered, “and I . . . had come here.”
I shook my head. “Still sounds a bit stifled. Though the pluperfect tense is technically correct in this case, the perfect would sound a bit more natural.”
She groaned. “I apologize.”
“Don’t. You’ve made great progress in the last few weeks.” She really had. Her voice was much better than it had been before. She stammered less now, and her verb conjugations were almost perfect.
“I understand perfectly,” she said. “I just . . . have problems speaking like this.”
“Understandable. We were never meant to speak at such a low frequency. You just need to become a bit more comfortable with your voice.”
There was a short pause before she said, in a voice that was perhaps the worst I had heard from her over the course of the past three weeks: “How . . . why . . . can I think . . . you may . . .” She struggled for about half a minute before she screamed with frustration: “Why does this language have no . . . subjunctive mood!”
“No, it does,” I said, calmly. “Though, to be fair, it’s extremely contextual; it’s used rarely and does not posses the subtlety and the versatility that it does in our language. You’ll have to make do. Work on your voice in itself and, especially, your accent. You know how I worked on that?”
“How?”
“What is your name?” I asked the ultimate question.
“My name . . . my name is—”
I didn’t hear the rest, for I was distracted when I felt something prod my ribcage with quite a substantial amount of force, quite painfully, I might add. “My . . . name . . . is . . . Errenax!” My brother colleague in squabbles was poking me in the ribs with his horn and had said this broken phrase in a jeering voice.
I did not see the humor, and such an anger filled me that I almost bit his head off in pure frustration. When were they going to forget that? How many studies did I have to do, how much research, how many essays written, how many lectures delivered to how many students until that little phrase was but a lacuna in the manuscript of my career? It hadn’t been funny the first time, and it did not get funnier the more they said it. “Your name is Errenax!” I screamed at him.
He took a step back and looked at me coyly. “What?” he mused, innocently. “No, your name is Errenax!”
He and my sister laughed simultaneously as I stood there with my mouth open in bemusement. How could these brutes think that making fun of the things that I had said were funny? Were we juveniles again? Mockery was the lowest form of humor, suitable only for the slowest-witted of creatures. It was unfortunate: I had come to think of these ones as higher, smarter; and here, in a fatal blow, they had destroyed my noble opinion of them which they had spent weeks building. I did not see the humor in . . . no, I did. The mockery of me was only one part of the joke, and I had not seen how multifaceted it was. Moreover, it was a joke based on the nuances of the language—a sort of inside joke that could only be shared between the six of us. How subtle! How clever! I blushed when I realized that my sister had understood this before I had. And here I was supposed to be her professor!
“You see,” she giggled, “it’s funny for the reason—”
“I know! I know!” I laughed, as I shoved her to the ground.
Whether I be a student or a scholar, a professor or a sage, may I wizen and crumble away as the lifeless dirt that I am should I ever find myself unable to drop my title’s pretenses in order to intimately enjoy and partake in those lighthearted and timeless physical gestures of camaraderie, juvenile in method, fortifying in spirit!
*
There were four races of the beasts, the ponies, four disguises we could assume when we were to walk among them, each one more crippling to our bodies than the last: There were the unicorns, who had the ability to use magic, but were frail and weak and would lose any fight of a physical nature, and their magic could be used only for very specific purposes. There were earth-ponies, stronger, bulkier, and more industrious, but also slower and more dim-witted compared to their unicorn brothers. There were the pegasi, which seemed like the obvious choice of disguise at first, having the power of flight and speed, but their massive wings, stretching so far from their bodies, gave them a remarkably large moment of inertia that I, having tried to assume the form myself, could not even conceive of the enormous magnitude of strength their wing muscles required that would be necessary to get them off the ground. Then there were alicorns, the ones that had the form of all three combined—and, thus, had the handicaps of all three combined. All four races had large vocal chords, which made it more practical to speak but much harder to shrill. They certainly weren’t making this easy for us.
But I was getting pretty confident in my ability to emulate their manner. So confident, in fact, that, in a whim of hubris, I excused myself from the group and shifted myself into an earth-pony, unseen, hoping to catch them by surprise. Then, I jumped out of the grass and bellowed, more eager to use some slang I’d recently discovered in some old texts than to test my pony form’s verisimilitude: “Oh, what’s this I see? Those ‘changelings’ I keep hearing about? Disgusting, absolutely disgusting! Giant bugs, all of you! I’m going to get my friends, and we’re going to drive you back to the wretched lands whence you came!”
All five of them recoiled, flared the skin on their necks, and hissed, preparing to jump on me. I was surprised by the reaction; I had not expected them to be fooled. My initial desire was to see how long it would take for them to catch on, but after ten seconds, as they started to approach me with the clear intent to kill, my fear got the better of me, and I forced a nervous, revealing laugh before shifting back in front of them. They saw my nervous grin, and it took a second for them to realize what had happened before they burst into a raucous laughter. Whether they were laughing in a congratulatory manner for my convincing performance or whether they were laughing to spite me for the fear that I had shown, it didn’t matter. I laughed, too. The ultimate test of the prowess of one’s disguise is the ability to deceive your brothers and sisters, even for a short moment. I considered what had happened to be a pass.
*
The six of us stood before our sister queen. “Are you ready, my first brothers and sisters?” she shrilled.
It was starting to feel odd for me to shrill, and I was worried I was beginning to lose my roots. I shook the thought off; it was a silly one, of course.
“If I presumed to speak for all present,” I replied, “I would say that we have practiced tirelessly and that no more improvement to our abilities is possible.”
She nodded, smiling endearingly, and looked back to me. “The others respect and tolerate you, brother,” she continued. “I and they would be honored to call you our brother commander. Do you accept?”
No response from me was necessary to assert my affirmation. The decision felt right, warranted, by all present. My silence declared all that I needed to say. And when she spoke—spoke—we instantly realized the implications, and none of us could visualize the possibility of failure.
“We are ready,” she said.
I turned to address them all. “Be assured, my brothers and sisters, that I won’t let you down.” I studied them closely to gauge their reactions. When I saw that they had all understood the odd idiom, I knew that we were ready.